Soft Eject
by dblauvelt
Summary: Completed. Liz Shaw's daughter encounters a suicidal 7th Doctor.
1. Chapter 1

St. Jude's Hospital  
Montana  
June 2008

In No Particular Order

_Sometimes... it's easy to be myself._  
Dave Mathews

Screaming.

Tiles are pressed up against my face, cold and gritty; I can see dried streaks from excess floor wax left on the runner boards: frozen drool, yellow and hard.

Batman camera angle. Along the bottom edge of the cabinet I can see them.

They're screaming.

They opened him up.

And _something_ came out.

It was just a cold and stomach cramps… there was no reason to be here really. The doctor wanted to run a blood test, just to be sure.

The same old same routine. Check in to the emergency room, wait two hours, read the mags, watch the soaps, soundless on the tv high up in the corner. Couldn't get that stupid song out of my head. Get dragged into a back room, jabbed, given a cookie and some juice. Wait, sit there with my forearm stained with a urine-yellow daub of iodine.

That's when the fluorescent overhead light started to shout at me, my abdomen twisted with pain, and my eyes attempted to relay to my brain that there were only one door, not three.

As per usual, I didn't listen.

But I think I caught on that I didn't just have the flu.

Screaming, they're all screaming and I can't do anything.

No, they aren't screaming. They're all lying on the ground, still not moving. Blue aprons dot the floor across the hall. From my angle, they look like a landscape of rolling cerulean hills.

Slightly rumpled hills. With blood on them.

But they're still screaming. In my head.

Something on the operating table is moving. I can see the trolley legs wobble slightly.

_Sometimes... it's better to be somebody else._

Lights flashed, one by one, across my vision. The sound of the creaking trolley sounded like an alien cry, over and over, bleating, squeaking. The inside of my eyelids were pink with bright green spots smeared across them. I could hear the patter of a dozen hospital slippers running along beside me. A mask on my face, condensation dripping onto my lips. Couldn't move. The air was sweet cloying.

I don't know why I was still awake.

Minus two points for taking a corner too fast. The force tilted my head to the right.  
My eyes opened.

Big boots. Black and yellow rubber thudding across my sight. I think I can hear shouts, but they are drowned out by the screaming that only I hear. At least I can't hear that song any more.

One pair of boots stops by my face. Knees, thigh, crotch, jacket, hands, mirror. The hands pull the mirror upward. Ah, a gas mask. Oh look, it's Mister Fireman. Hello, Mister Fireman, how are you?

His mouth is moving, but I can't hear anything. He pats my shoulder and stands up, gesturing to others. They are all running about.

Well, they were.

Now they're falling too: the firemen are falling, helmets spinning, rolling away across the floor.

Screaming.

They were wearing gas masks, now limp and rotting on the floor, a dozen truncated animal snouts, seemingly trying to crawl into the throats of the screaming men. Dying men.

Operating theater, I was across from an operating theater. They parked me across the hall. I could see in through the door as the nurses talking to one another. My nose itched. The fire in my gut… I couldn't feel it, but knew it was there.

There was an old man on the operating table. Fractured leg, the rushed words drifted across from one of the nurses. Shock, malnutrition and more techno-babble. Appendicitis… They were trying to get me in there first. But I could see the nurse press the needle of the IV into his arm.

I could see her spinning backward, spraying the air with the saline fluid. It splattered against the ceiling. The others ran towards her, grabbing for her. As they run, an elbow catches the edge of my bed. My trolley topples over: the ceiling, wall, and floor streaking by. _Sometimes... it's easy to be me. _

I hit the floor.

It doesn't matter, I couldn't feel anything.

A nurse ran to me, but just like the others, she fell silent to the floor, retching and clawing at her face.

I tried to call out to her, but the blue-green stickiness of the oxygen mask was still wrapped around my nose and mouth.

I think the anesthetic is wearing off, my legs are all pins and needles and I can feel my drool pooling in the mask at the base of my chin. I remember dreaming, but not sleeping.

The yellow and blue heaps are clearer now, I can make out brown hair jutting from under the cap of the nurse who came to help me, can see her wedding ring on her left hand.

I can make out the twisted expression on her face. The blackened lips. Crusty brown-red eyes, dripping slime green puss.

I close my eyes.

Black shoes. Not penny-loafers or the kind with laces. No, the really expensive Italian kind, the ones Jana always promises to get me for my birthday. There are a dozen or more black shoes scuffing and shuffling about now, all clustered around the main operating table.

I feel something give inside of me, a organic snap within my stomach. The pain slams me upside my head; my back arches upwards as I spit something up. My numbed arms clutch around my intestines as my appendix eviscerates.

They see me now.

As my eyes fill with tears and white light, I can see a hand pulling off my mask.

I can hear myself screaming. It matches the sound in my head.

_Open up my head... and let me out._


	2. Chapter 2

**Airborne**

_Mommy, I want to be like Superman._

Superman would have stopped it.

He could feel the plastic knob clutched within the palm of his left hand. It was slick and warm with the sweat of his skin. 

Luke Skywalker wouldn't have done it.

It was always different when it was someone else. Easy to know what to do. To say what's right or wrong, he thought.

An audible electronic _click_ signaled the approach of the target area into the scope, switching on the head-up display.

How many Batmans were picked to fly the Enola Gay? To have to make that choice?

My actions will change the world, he thought to himself. Look Ma, he half-whispered nervously, one hand.

Are you proud of me Mom?

Bond would have fought it.

He glanced over at the "cargo" resting upon the bay doors. The trouble was, they didn't expect a private to be able to read the complex scrawling of black on yellow print, let alone understand the sequence of capital and lower case letters. The letters that were the best bet at the chemical composition and structure of what lay within the metal casing. But you didn't have to even pass high school chemistry to understand what the red and white stickers meant.

Or the letters BIOHZD1.

Or the skull and cross-bones.

No illusions, he thought as he squirmed slightly at his console. You know what you're doing. He reached up into his breast pocket and pulled out one of his gloves. He slid it on his left hand and renewed his grip upon the release lever.

Am I a hero?

His brother would have laughed. His father would have laughed. But not his mother. She would have just stared quietly in that way of hers and say once more that you know in your heart what to do and we will stand by you.

Would you, Mother? Your son is in an unmarked cargo plane, about to drop "something" onto millions of innocents living below me.

Spiderman would have jammed the doors.

He stared at the thousands of little white pixels that represented the houses, buildings and office blocks as they blurred past below them.

Does this make me Lex Luther?

He could actually hear the pounding of his heart now, could taste his stomach in his mouth as the highlighted "X" came into view over central downtown London.

The colors of the bay-door warning lights sent his mind spinning back, into his past. The strobing red lights of the fire trucks and ambulance as colored figures clustered around him, a large white towel nestled around him. Flashing on the body of his little sister as they lifted her out of the wreck of the car. Of sitting on his bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark. Of feeling so helpless, so tiny, so small. Insignificant.

The sound of Lieutenant Chalmers' voice came over the speaker, telling him to stand by.

Buffy would have beaten the shit out of Lieutenant Chalmers.

He slowly pulled his hand back, away from the control.

Kirk wouldn't push that button.

That was the problem with reality. It was real.

He couldn't even hear his own breathing over the rushing winds that seemed to tear the plane apart.

No one would ever know his name. No one would ever really care. It wasn't up to him. If he didn't someone else would. No one cared about him. He wasn't special.

Peter Taylor closed his eyes and slammed the lever slammed 45 degrees into the OPEN position.

_Mommy I want to be like Superman._

It was only then that he opened his eyes and stared at the umbrella firmly clamped in his fist where the release lever should have been. Amazed, he turned around and saw, instead of the deadly masses of cylinders there was a blue box sitting in the middle of the cargo hold, impossibly small, impossibly smug, as if it had swallowed all of the weapons and was now just sitting there, digesting.

"Do you mind?" a polite Scottish voice asked, plucking the red and black umbrella out of his grip. Taylor stared at the little man in the breezy white suit and Panama hat who smiled a Cheshire cat smile at him as he swung the umbrella over his shoulder. "Sorry, just tidying up a bit. Spring cleaning. You know how it is." The man paused in front of the door.

And then he was gone.

Taylor gaped at the empty plane, wondering how the hell he was going to explain this to anyone.

Caught up in the noise, the wind, the shock, the emptiness, it took him a moment to realize he was crying.


	3. Chapter 3

The sun glared from above and bounced off the desert sands around them. Blinding from above and so below. The tropical lushness of western Washington was behind them, and within a few miles had changed into a barren wasteland.

Barren, thought Shard, but beautiful. The whites and yellows were broken up by dwarfed shrubs and cacti, all canopied under a rich blue sky. She rolled the window further down and shoved her arm out into the cool air as they sped through it. 

The Cadillac had seen better days. The air-conditioning had failed about seventy thousand miles ago, and rust - due to the long salt-encrusted winters in the Northeast- had corroded and shredded the blue paint work and split the go-faster stripes. The engine had started to hum slightly, as the oil in the engine solidified into black sludge. They had used up the spare tire on the way out and were riding high on the hopes that the spare would last them back to the Atlantic.

Automobile maintenance was not Bryce's strong point.

Shard glanced over at him, squinting to keep the wind off her eyes. He was staring straight ahead as usual, his left hand resting on the window ledge and his right hand hanging limp on the U of the steering wheel, the faded, dated, tie-dyed shirt whipped in the breeze exposing his thin arms and slim trunk, pale and white. 

Montana, Big Sky State. No shit, thought Shard as she stared at the vast expanse before them. Beats Idaho, though.

"So you're never getting married right?"

Shard pulled her head back out of the breeze from the window. "What?"

"You said you'd never get married," repeated Bryce.

"The concept's so out dated," she said, squinting into the horizon. "I'm not going to commit myself to one person for the rest of my life."

"You're weird, Beavis."

"The thought of staying with one person for the rest of my life," she said. "That sounds weird to me."

"Why?"

"I'm not religious, in any way," Shard said. "It wouldn't mean anything to me in that sense."

"What's wrong with having someone to share life with, to grow old together, to help each other?" Bryce asked as he squinted into the glare of the morning sun.

"What planet are you from again?" She asked mockingly. "Maybe my frame of reference is a little distorted, having been adopted by two people who are now divorced."

"So, let me get this straight. You're dating your boss..."

"Ex-boss," she corrected. "As of last month, anyway."

"Who is married..."

"Separated," she snapped. "Mostly."

"And you don't use protection of any kind..."

"For the past six years, I've used the Think Method."

"The Think Method."

"If I don't think I can get pregnant then I won't."

"Right."

"It's worked so far."

"And you wanna know what planet I'm from?" Bryce asked.

Shard stared ahead, tight lipped.

"Let me guess," ventured Bryce. "You're late."

"Yes."

"Oh."

Silence.

"So are you going to call him Dennis or Mark or..."

"Shut up!" she smacked him on the arm, but she was laughing.

"Hey, easy. I'm just-" Bryce paused for a second. "Hey, wait a sec, where's my camera?

"What? Why?"

"You still got it?" He asked excitedly. He started fumbling between the seats, only one hand on the wheel and both eyes stuck to the sky.

"Yeah, hold on-" she said reaching under her seat, sorting through the Pepsi bottles and McDonald's wrappers. "Got it."

"Come on!"

"What?" she asked exasperatedly, looking down the road.

Bryce flailed an arm across her face. "Over there, what, you blind or something?"

She followed his frantic waving and stared off to the left. Distance was deceptive here, especially out West with no points of reference. But the mushroom cloud looked only about five miles away. It was the size that bothered Shard.

"Roll the window down," said Bryce, "get a couple shots. Holy shit!"

"What is it?" Shard stared at the expanding mass. It was as large as a thunderstorm, sitting above the plain and swelling larger.

**Springfield, Tennesee**

Barry was old. And bitter. He had waited all his life to be old and bitter and by God he was going to enjoy it.

The moon was just a quarter full, just a slice of lemon peeping through the evening clouds. The chill nights of winter were quietly being softened by the northerly breezes and Barry could once more pull out his sun chair outside the steps of his door.

He lay on his aluminum and rayon throne and reclined his head facing upwards, watching the sparkling vista above him with his eyes closed.

And his ears open.

It was a dull night at the apartment complex: the confused babblings of a dozen different televisions blurred together, somewhere the water was running, and someone somewhere was playing Eleanor Rigby over and over again.

Barry let out a quiet sigh as he felt a warm brush against his leg. He bent down and scooped Phoebe up into his arm. Phoebe nuzzled his chin and flicked her tail in his face as he scratched the base of her tail. She turned around several times in his lap before perching upon one knee, purring softly, keeping sentinel as Barry returned his thoughts back to eternity.

From above them, there came and incessant ringing. Each plea of the electronic pealing was met with a steamy silence.

Harry became so distracted by the noise that he started counting the rings. He had reached sixteen when he heard the sound of rushing water squeak off, followed by a female voice that uttered a very unladylike oath. This was quickly followed by a loud, wet, thud.

Several more unlady-like shouts drifted down to Barry and Phoebe, followed by scrabbling noises, possibly like those made by an angry, sopping wet person frantically pulling herself across slimy tiles having slipped upon, say, a towel.

Finally the ringing stopped.

"WHAT?"

Barry eavesdropped without the slightest sense of guilt.

Pause.

A battered Buick, radio blaring, pulled up alongside the row of parked cars, and a young man jumped out. He ran across to the door of apartment C and started pounding on the old and splintered wood.

Barry shook his head as he watched the young man. The owner of that apartment had bolted the night before, scared away by a raid a few doors down. Most of his clientele had yet to learn that their dealer had done a runner.

After some kicking and muttering, the youth jumped back in his car empty handed and sped off into the night. As Barry's ears adjusted to the sudden quiet, he began to catch pieces of her voice again.

"You can tell Commodore Mrazik to go shove his head up his own… A gas?... It releases a gas... Nothing on any of the bodies... A bacteria?... Virus, then... Well, is it or isn't it?"

Barry felt a tiny wet spot at the top of his knee as the cat's drool began to soak through his jeans, purring with contentment.

"Well you should know, not me. After all, I'm the one they fired. How long is the incubation period?"

She swore, violently.

Phoebe stopped purring.

"What change? New Orleans! I just resigned yesterday… I only just moved in, I'm not going back to New Orleans-"

Silence. Long and heavy.

Barry drifted off to sleep, and Phoebe curled into a warm, furry ball in his lap.

Phoebe jumped four feet into the air, gouging out a considerable portion of Barry's legs as the box dropped out of the sky next to them.

Barry stared up at the window above.

A head, mottled with slick, wet hair poked out of the window.

"Well, don't just sit there," Dr. Sahara Shaw yelled. "Help me get this crap outta here!"

**Rio Grande,  
American-Mexican Border  
November, 1974**

Pain flashed through her and her body spasmed. She forced herself to remain upright, forced herself to ignore the cold water that was up to her waist, to block out the shouts around her. She spread her arms out for balance and staggered once more through the river, her feet sliding as they lost grip and the tide pulled at her, tearing her further downstream.

She made several more wearing steps before her body folded on itself once again and her vision was sparkling with white lightening. Her teeth clenched as the contraction overwhelmed her and she curled around her belly. Her mouth gulped water and her head told her she was floating, floating away.

Her gut clenching as her lungs heaved, she unfurled and lanced upward out of the water, taking great heaving breaths of rich, wonderful air. She spat up water and her feet skidded along the bottom as they dug for purchase in the mud and silt. She blinked clear her eyes and saw that she had been carried another twenty meters downstream.

She couldn't tell if she was crying, her face was so drenched with sweat and the water of the Rio Grande. She barked out a short harsh laugh. She wondered if her water had broken. 

It had been so long, her family so far away… her limbs ached and her vision was fuzzy around the edges, blind with pain. 

There were no thoughts in her head, she kept moving with a driving desire a need, for her baby to be born on U.S. soil, to not to be cursed with her life. She kept walking. Blood left a scarlet trail, waving and dissipating as it flowed downstream from her.

At 1:45 A.M. she gave birth a sandy bank of the Northeast shore of the Rio Grande River. She died twenty minutes latter, her baby clutched to her chest, the umbilical cord still attached.

The dogs found her first. The guards came across them soon afterward.

No one even knew her name.

Crying on the banks of the river, gritty sand peppering his red skin, lashed by doggie tongues was a boy who could save the world.


	4. Chapter 4

**Wheat field, Montana**

Sound of rushing wind flowing gently through the wheat field. Nothing can be seen except wheat, wheat and more wheat.

Shard: "Bryce?" (frightened edge to her voice)

Pause shuffling of feet through the field

Bryce: "Over here." (off left)

Shard: "I can't see you!"

Bryce: "Follow my voice, we're almost there. I think."

Shard: "Keep talking."

Bryce: "So... how good are you with diapers?"

Shard: "You are so evil. What about that movie you were talking about making? That  
vampire thing?"

Bryce: "I told you about that already."

Shard: "I sorta fell asleep, sorry."

Bryce: "Hmmm…. it's set in present day with vampires, right?-Careful, it's muddy over here- well, no one can fight them, they're too strong. Well, they're immortal, aren't they? No one can beat'em-"

Shard: "Except?"

Bryce: "Except them that ain't got blood to drink."

Shard: "Lawyers?

Bryce: "Nahh. I didn't say they had bad taste. Think furry."

Shard: "Furry? Ferrets?"

Bryce (laughs): Vampire-slaying ferrets?

Shard: "Well, what then?"

Bryce: "Easy. Muppets."

Shard: "Muppets!"

Bryce: "Yeah, they don't got any blood, do they, just stuffing, like. But Kermit, Piggy, Janice, Zute, they all got squirt guns filled with holy water.

Shard: "Humanity's last hope are Muppets with holy water?"

Bryce: "Yeah, schweet, in'nit?"

Shard: "Yeah... Right. Are we there yet?"

Bryce: "Ummm... (pauses) I think so."

Shard: "So you think we should have just left the car out on the road like that?"

Bryce: "What, you worried about a couple of car-jacking ferrets might drive off with it? Anyway, there's this big finale scene at Niagara Falls, right? The Muppets get some priest to bless the water… Big fight scene, we're talking millions of dollars here, heli-cams, boats- Miss Piggy spamming some serious undead butt!"

-Cue strange noises off-

Shard: "Wha-waz-zat?"

Bryce: "Eh?"

Shard: "Did you hear that?"

Bryce: "No, noth-"

Bryce lets out yell. Sound of falling rocks and moving earth

Shard runs faster, footsteps padding along

Shard: "Bryce? Bryce - Jesus! Are you all right? Sound of footsteps squelching through mud

Bryce: "I think it's some sorta blast crater."

Shard: "Blast crater! -coughs- Come on, let's get outta here."

Bryce: "Whoa, the ground's still warm."

Shard: "Bryce!"

Bryce: "I think there's something over here." -coughs-

Shard: "I can't- there's too much smoke- I can't see anything. Bryce!"

-Rumbling surrounds them-

Shard: "Bryce!" -coughs-

Bryce: -panting- "Come on, give me your hand!"

-Chopper blades whirr down- Shouts drift through the smoke. Thuds of a dozen heavy boots thudding through the mud.-

Bryce: "MOVE!"


	5. Chapter 5

**New Orleans**

Dr. Sahara Shaw was met by two burly men in black who ushered her to the waiting van, after glancing at her UNIT pass. Sahara was somewhat relieved they didn't comment on the dried bits of cabbage that she hadn't managed to scrape off the badge. Once inside, the van sped off into the thickening dusky night, deep into the city.

They wouldn't answer her questions.

They handed her a clipboard with a name on it. Below the name was a description and a biog, and a little tracking machine that bleeped as she moved it.  
Then Sahara watched the alleys, whores, and lights flash by the tinted windows. The streets were hot and smelled of sweat, and much worse. She found him on a corner, a joyboy decked out for a night as the town.

She double checked her notebook and repeated her question in Spanish.

He looked too old to be in his early twenties. His black hair was thick and long, his thin body was wrapped in a tight fitting denim jacket and torn jeans.

As she had traveled the streets, the others had thrown insults and garbage, others had called to her mockingly. But he remained silent, merely staring ahead.

"Antonio?"

Silence.

"Excuse me, you are Antonio Contonte, aren't you? This says you speak English, I know you can understand me." Sahara waited a moment more, and with a sigh, waved to the lugs who were waiting in the van.

They grabbed him and bustled him into the back.

Sahara sat with him as they drove, asking him again and again, but he remained silent.

She saw a bistro flash by out of the corner of her eye and shouted for them to stop. Minutes later, she and Antonio were seated at a table, the thugs sulking outside in the van.

She ordered two soups and two glasses of wine. While they waited, she studied his face, and inched hers closer to him. "This is not good-cop bad-cop. I'm not like that." She chewed thoughtfully on a tortilla chip. "Think of it more as Confused-Scientist-Who-Is-Trying-To-Work-Out-What-The-Hell-Is-Going-On."

"Fuck off."

Sahara swallowed. "Suit yourself. However," she added as she leaned back in her chair, "they're going to slice you up to see why you're so special."

"Good-Scientist, Bad-Scientist?" he asked. "Been there, done that."

Sahara raised her eyebrows, just a little.

He unzipped his shirt and revealed the scar tissue and burn marks.

"Christ," muttered Sahara softly. "Who did that?"

"You did."

"I," said Sahara defensively, "am a toxicologist, who dabbles in gardening and calls out bingo numbers every Friday night at the Mary Mead Retirement home."

"The collective you," he thrust his finger at the badge on her lapel. "Omogene. They do this, to us."

Sahara uncrossed her arms. She leant forward again, closer. His breath smelt of latex and semen.

"Tell me."

They smashed their way in.

The front of the van was lodged against the concrete of the far wall, the surviving headlight glaring off the lime green paint, while the remains of the radiator hissed violently.

Sahara took out the first guard through the passenger window, leveling the air pistol on the sill, framing the man's surprised face in the sights. The man, Tonio read his badge, spun backwards, clutching his neck as the dart splurted into the flesh. He let out a silent, gasping scream as his fingers clawed at the concrete floor.

Sahara's father had taken her to the range when she was just twelve. Her arm had jerked back with the first round, the heel of the gun had carved out a chunk of her forehead.

She still had the scar.

Her round impacted off the far wall and ricocheted into the rafters, missing the paper target by twenty feet.

She ejected the casing of the spent round as she leapt out of the door and rolled by the first body, loading the next dart with a sharp jerk of her other hand. UNIT troops filled the hallways beside her, but she kept to the front, leading the way down the halls of the company she had worked in, undercover until a few days ago.

Every time she broke up with a boyfriend, she would go back to the range to take out her anger.

She felled the next guard before he could even shout.

Sahara was thirty-two now; she had been through a lot of boyfriends.

"They come at night," as he began, Sahara watched the slow trickle of broth drip down his stubbly chin, wandering left and right, before suddenly darting for his lap.

"They come in vans, like yours. They find us asleep, take us, tie us to stretchers. Noone sleeps in the parks anymore. It took a while for anyone to notice, don't have family, friends, just what they got with'em. No one gives a shit about trash like us. But we noticed. Got Xavier the week before me. I woke up in a van. I just wanted to go back to sleep, but I couldn't- they wouldn't let me..."

A sergeant shouldered in the door. Not dramatic or quick: they had to kick at the restraining bolt several times before it splintered free of the wood. They headed down the corridor at a run. Blue doors flashed past on either side, the window panels in each door were dark black panes.

Sahara took out the receptionist before the poor woman could even stand up from behind her desk. When she hit the floor, her head _bounced_ with a wet melon thud.

Sahara felt a little bad about that.

Sahara had watched all the B movies and always felt pity for the poor guards who always bought it first. Nameless faces that died left and right, extras that could never shoot straight. Then she had thought about the twenty-six years she had spent in school, working for her degree that the guards, who probably made twelve dollars an hour more than her, could barely even pronounce and yet still probably made thirty grand more than her a year.

She felt a little better as she blasted the next tranquilizer dart into the guard by the outer office.

Just a little.

The trail of broth had hardened and dried, a broken trail within a forest of stubble.

"We were locked up in a room, side by side, one by one. Could hear each other, couldn't see. Left us like that for a while. They left the lights on and pumped us full a something so we couldn't sleep." He took a drag from his glass.

"Then they brought in this guy, made him stand in the center of the room. Then they all left. Was weird-usually they just take us lows for organs, eyes, whatever. Not this time. The guy, they shot him, the guy standing there. They left the room and shot him."

"Then this gas came out of the entry wound. Filled the room and everyone started screaming. It hurt to breathe." Antonio chewed at the lip of a Styrofoam cup, his teeth rubbing against the material with rubbery squeaks. "After a while, the screaming stopped."

Sahara searched through the desk and fumbled through the drawers, papers. Manila folders spilled out in fractal patterns on the floor around the desk.

She saw something glint nestled among the rubber bands. She grabbed the key and slotted it into the mail bolt of the big double doors. She twisted the key, heard the tumblers slide.

She looked at Antonio and the troops who stood by her side, guns held ready.

"When they saw I was still alive, they seemed surprised. Everyone else was dead. Good for them. Bad for me." A red rivulet of Merlot paralleled the path of the desiccated yellow broth down his chin.

"They poked and jabbed, took..." he paused, flushing red slightly, "took samples. Took out bits." He rubbed the area between his jaw and his throat, and Sahara could see the scars where his lymph nodes had been surgically removed.

Sahara closed her mouth and rolled her dry tongue around to regain some moisture. The entire time she'd worked at Omogene, she hadn't seen anything, not like this. Months and she'd never even gotten close. "And?" she prompted, barely containing the revulsion and anger that flooded through her.

He paused. "And I fell asleep," he looked back down at the table cloth, setting down his empty glass. "And I woke up back on the street."

Sahara snapped out of her daze. "Right. Come on."

"Where?" He looked up at her as she rose to leave. "What's daddy's little girl gonna do?" He sneered.

"Daddy's little girl," she said slowly, "is going to get her little German-made semi-automatic weapon and friendly neighborhood paramilitary taskforce and is going to find out what the hell is going on. Coming?"

They stormed into the office and Sahara drew a tiny red bead on the squirming forehead of her ex-boss.

"All right. I'm asking nicely," said Sahara quietly. "Just this once."


	6. Chapter 6

Yellow Stone National Park

What was the worst nightmare you've ever had? When was the last time the echoing beat of your heart matched the pounding steps of _something_ in your head? The figure of a murderer/monster/Thing at your window, just a few feet away who will hear you if you so much as breathe, so much as move. Every muscle in your body frozen, the scream heavy in the back of your throat

When all you can do is watch as time moves so slowly around you, and you can't do anything but stare and try to cry for help… but if you do, you're dead.

And the figure/monster/killer slowly starts to turn, to see you, he must see you and you can't move and your stomach starts crawling up your throat as you feel like you're falling, falling...

Now, when was the last time you actually saw your nightmare happen? In real life?

_This isn't happening._

Shard sat on a bench, shielded by a crowd of tourists, sucking on the splitends of her long hair.

_They had been doing well. They had made it back to the car and onto the freeway, heading away from the cloud, making the best use of Montana's "speed limit."_

Shard remembered when they had stopped at McDonald's outside Olympia, two days ago. She had got a chicken salad while Bryce had poked questioningly at the air bubbles in his Chicken McNuggets.

_The car had stalled at the North entrance to Yellowstone National Park. They debated camping the night, but when the first stutters of choppers drifted through the trees, they stuck out their thumbs and hitched it into the park with a nice German couple in a Geo Prism._

They had sat down at the plastic red table and white seats. Bryce had snagged the comics section from the front counter. She had squeezed some Ranch dressing out of a tube as Bryce pointed out the latest Calvin and Hobbes.

_They finally hiked their way through the park. They stayed clear of the main paved paths, and headed off into the woods. They were doing fine until they stumbled clear of the trees and out onto the black and gray scablands. The forest fires had carved out a massive area of forest, the ugly ground studded with the charred remains of tree stumps, decorated with dozens of slimy white mushrooms._

The helicopters droned into sight above them.

As Bryce ran, Shard found that her legs had sunk into the wet, muddy soil up to her knees.

Bryce turned back toward her.

When she had tried to light up, the lady at the counter had pointed to the NO SMOKING sign pinned to the wall. They moved to the tables outside next to the playground area, and she had complained about how the Smoke Nazis could never take away their right to smoke outside.

_Shard saw his shoulder jerk sharply backward. She never did remember hearing the gunfire. She did see the slow trickle of gray smoke that floated out of his shoulder._

Shard was at least twenty meters away from Bryce. But somehow, she could still see every detail of his face. Could see his light brown hair shifting slightly in the breeze. The confusion filling his face as he stared at the stuff issuing upwards out of him.

She could remember how he had burst out laughing, pointing over her shoulder.

_The look of confusion that flashed into sheer panic._

Pointing to the picnic area sign above her head that read, "Please do not smoke outside."

_Shard felt the scream in her throat, aching to come out. She wanted to make her legs move, to run, to scream... to do something, anything._

Shard heard the** whoosh** of the rocket launcher as it zoomed out of the chopper.

In her mind, she could hear his quiet laughter, as her eyes saw him look at her across the ash and mud and death.

And the world went white.

Imprinted on her retinas was the bluish blur of his hair burning, and his eyes crying.

When Shard woke up, she found herself lying face down in the bushes. She gave the newly charred area a brief, pained glance and ran.  
Now she was sitting on a bench, shielded by a crowd of tourist, sucking the ends of her hair.

_This can't be happening._


	7. Chapter 7

New Orleans

Sahara thanked God he didn't have a gun. She didn't think she could deal with that. He was crouched in an almost fetal position in the recliner behind his desk, trembling.

At her!

She felt absurd at the macho image she must be making: standing on the oak desk, her legs in engarde stance, pointing a gun at the clichéd and cowering villain. Her knuckles were sliced raw from the shattered windshield and her shirt was a sweaty mess. She shifted her weight to her right foot, her left aching from when she had pulled it helping kick in the door. She was still panting from what was really a really short run. Some heroine, she thought to herself, sucking in her breath. Still, eight points for style. Minus twenty for technical merit.

It was just as well that Donovan was too scared shitless to notice. He was still babbling the word, "What?" repeatedly.

She pressed her advantage, leaning closer, pressing the gun closer to his face. "Putting aside, for the moment, the minor issue of body snatching and illegal organ "donation," which I'm sure the Supreme Court can't wait to get their teeth into, not to mention the UN. Putting all that aside for a moment, I want to know what the hell did you creeps do to him?" she jerked her thumb at Antonio, spittle flying, punctuating her anger.

Donovan was silent, his eyes wide.

They grew wider as they locked onto Antonio's face, became bright with recognition and panic.

They locked back onto the barrel as Sahara cocked it with a quiet click.

"I fired you," was all he could manage.

"A bad move, given the current situation, don't you think? You have five seconds."

He blurted it out, in a frantic rush. "We needed him," his eyes darted to Antonio, "back."

"Why? What's so special about him?"

"His DNA," he replied. "That's all we know. We weren't able to isolate the gene. We needed him back to test his immunity."

"Immunity against what?" Sahara asked impatiently. This was taking far too long.

"A virus, of some sort," he replied lamely. "It infects-inhabits- a host, it produces a gas, that when released can penetrate any gas mask, debilitate any respiratory system."

"And kills," finished Sahara, nodding as she lowered her gun.

"No," said Donovan. "Not at all."

She forced her eyes to meet his.

Locked.

"The victims are rendered unconscious, but recover unharmed, just infected. As far as we can tell, it's benign." Donovan was visibly restraining himself, folding his hands into his lap.

"But Antonio said-"

"The government," began Donovan eyeing the other man warily, "the bioweapons division-I'll deny this, you know," his voice was firm as he interrupted himself, "I'll deny this..."

"Go on," she prompted.

"The army's weapons division altered it. Created G-187. With our help," he sounds almost angry, thought Sahara. "They piggy-backed a toxic substance that is released with the waste products the gas produces. Even in minute quantities, it will kill. Over time."

"Oh shit," said Sahara with feeling. "Gas masks won't work-"

"Why?" shouted Antonio, his eyes on the verge of tears, his voice breaking. "Why did you let me go?"

"We couldn't isolate your immunity," Donovan said sadly. "We thought if we let you go, you might..." he waved his hands around, "spread it around."

Sahara looked at the far wall guiltily. She hadn't told Antonio of the tracker, the implant beneath his skin.

Antonio's voice became harder. "And now you want me back."

"The army wants you back," corrected Donovan. "They can't be caught parading around New Orleans, no matter how badly they want it."

Sahara lowered the gun and stepped down off the desk. "They won't use it," she said simply. "They can't."

"Go home," Donovan said to her. "This is too big for you now. Go home, while you still can."

"What do you mean?"

"Leave it to people who know what they're doing."

She took a step round the front of his desk, moving closer to him.

And shot him.

"That's for firing me," she said as he clutched the dart in his chest. She shot him once more in the crotch. "And that's for being such a patronizing bastard."

Donovan slumped to the floor.

Sahara let the gun slip to the floor with a _clunk_.

Antonio bent down and picked up the pistol.

"Now what?"

Sahara hugged herself and just stood there. "Heal the world," she said, "what else is an aging toxicologist slash ex-hippie to do?" She started to shake involuntarily in a fit of hysterical laughter. "I'm sorry," she said, "This is all absurd, so fucking unreal. I don't know what the fuck to do."

"We have a weapon," suggested Antonio softly. "Let's use it."

Sahara stared at him, his scarred skin still visible through his thin shirt. She nodded.

"How do we get to them?"

"One guess," said Sahara, a slow smile spreading across her features, the first real smile in weeks. 

"Daddy?"

"Nope, Daddy's dead dear." Sahara shook her head. "This is a job for Mother."


	8. Chapter 8

"Several years ago a crowd was gathered around Crystal Pool. One of the many families had brought their dog to the Park along with them. Upon seeing the clear blue water, the animal became excited and broke free of its owner and leapt into the pool.  
"Upon seeing this, one of the crowd, a young man, jumped after the dog to rescue the poor animal from the hot chemical springs. After a minute, they had to pull him out as most of his skin had been dissolved away.  
"Two hours later, in the hospital just before he died, the young man remarked that, "'It was the stupidest thing I ever did.'"  
_Paraphrased from a brochure warning tourists of the hazards of Yellow Stone National Park_

Yellowstone National Park

Shard looked up nervously from the national park pamphlet in her hand. She sat with her legs crossed and with an elbow propping up her chin. She was still sweating, but she had stopped feeling the urge to vomit. She had spent twenty minutes in one of the rest rooms attempting to put her long hair up into a tight bun. Her sweater and baseball cap had been dumped into the nearest bin.

Now she was sitting on a bench as the crowd churned around in front of her and concentrated on not thinking. Trying desperately not to match any description they may have put out on her.

She was near one of the less popular geysers; the main crowds were milling about Old Faithful, which was twenty minutes late as usual. She could feel the mist on the breeze as her geyser started to spout off. People began to "oohh" and "ahh," gathering around her, snapping pictures, smiling and sweating.

Shard put a hand to her forehead to cover her eyes, miming a sore brow. She got up and began to walk slowly down one of the paved paths, her head down, watching her feet. Her thoughts kept returning to Bryce, but she kept forcing them to the back of her mind. She was getting hungry, which helped to distract her from those other thoughts.

It was as she turned back around to head towards the convenience stalls near Old Faithful that she saw them.

As she began to sprint along the pathway away from them, it struck her how ludicrous they seemed. Decked out in Black Suits and ties while the rest of the tourist world consisted of tour groups and loud Americans, all glaring brightly in summer colors.

It was as if these men wanted people to notice them, to wonder at who they were.

To fear them.

Shard's boots thudded along the path. She could feel the wetness at her heels as her ankle scabs, relicts from her old pumps, ripped free. She could feel the stares of the tourists as she pushed past them.

The stroller came out of nowhere, wheeled out from the middle of a crowd. Her toe caught one of the front wheels but somehow she turned the momentum of the fall into a stumble and kept running. Her half-gasped mumble of an apology was drowned out by curses from the child's mother.

This part of the park was pretty flat and there was nowhere that she could hide. But a quick glance over her shoulder told her that her pursuers were following her. When she looked ahead again, Shard saw that she was running straight at two more of them.

Shard skidded to her right and shot straight off of the path, heading towards the tree line, across the geyser laden ground. There were shouts of concern from the visitors and a strangled yelp from the tour guide. As she sped along, she felt a stitch of pain flare up in her side and her steps became more and more uneven as fatigue slowly began to set in.

As she heard the footsteps close in behind her, she took a quick, deep breath and pushed her legs to go faster, just a little faster. The line of trees ahead were so close. She had just transferred all her weight from her left to her right foot when she felt herself lurch forward.

The crust of ground beneath her foot crumbled.

And her foot broke through, into the boiling acid waters. The force of her run pushed her forward, sending her splayed out upon the sandy ground.

Shard jerked her leg back sharply in revulsion as she felt hot, scalding water seep into her boot through the lace holes.

She looked up in time to see one of the men in black that was chasing her stumble as one of his Italian leather shoes poked through the hidden geothermal pool. She could see the look of surprise on his face, could see his mouth open, a clear transparent mask fall to the ground. She could see the look of fear on his face as he fell upon the ground.

And fall through.

Shard was already up and running as the screams began to fill the air.

* * *

And deep beneath them all an upwelling of rhyolitic magma pulsed upward, rising upon a convection current 400 kilometers from beneath the crust, crested towards the surface. As the pressure wave entered the main chamber, seismometers all over the park shuddered and frantically waved their little heat pens with excitement upon their white sheets.

Old Faithful spluttered and died.


	9. Chapter 9

**Airborne**

Sahara requisitioned a UNIT plane and then switched to a chopper in DC. Antonio had watched as the eastern seaboard flashed by below him, cities and beaches alternating by, one after another.

The chopper set them down outside a little white shed in southern West Virginia.

After the helicopter had lifted off and they could hear again, he caught up to her just as she reached the door of the shed.

"I thought we were going to meet your mother?"

"We were," Sahara said as she reached into her jacket pocket. "She got pulled onto something else, but she left me a message." She pulled out a scrap of paper with numbers scrawled across the surface. She began punching codes into an entry panel beside the doorframe.

He watched as she tapped away. "What, are you a computer expert too? Toxicologist, hacker and Sigourney Weaver all rolled into one?"

"No," Sahara shook her head sadly as she keyed the last code. "Just half-English." The door swished open and she stood aside for him to go through first. "On my mother's side."

* * *

**Yellowstone National Park**

They were behind her, they were right behind her and there was nowhere for her to go, there was no where left and she could barely breathe, Shard couldn't breath any more she couldn't go any further, she couldn't do it any more, she couldn't go any further, why were they trying to get her, why did they care, no one cared, no one ever cared, except Bryce who went and got himself killed, couldn't run, can't run, can't…

Thump, thump, thump… each step was heavier and heavier, dragging, panting, she could barely hear herself wheeze and gasp as she broke from the trees and staggered to the edge of the gorge, the steep yellow cliffs, gaping open, stretching down for what seemed like miles below her, the river gushing and rushing at the base, so distant it was as if it were on another planet or the moon in the sky.

Shard could hear the men stomping through the woods behind her; she didn't turn around, but she raised her hands, hypnotized, staring below at the emptiness that seemed so impressive somehow simply by virtue of not being there. It must have taken thousands and millions of years to carve out this canyon and here she was only twenty-

The sound of the gunshot made her flinch.

They'd missed. But it didn't matter. Shard had made her decision; to lie at their feet, bleeding and twisted like Bryce and those bodies in the crater, or become part of history, travel through time, past the layers of rock, into the past and be one with the flowing river- a chance to fly, for the first time in her life.

Without even letting herself think about it, without a thought at all, she stepped off the cliff, arms outspread and flew.

* * *

**West Virginia**

"What is this place?" Antonio stared around the empty concrete room, bare except for a central platform ringed by a small metal railing. By the door was a small plinth with a large red button embedded on top, stenciled with the words "Do Not Touch."

"Damned if I know. Mum always called it 'Church' but I think she was being sarcastic. She usually is…" Sahara squinted once more at the instructions on the crumpled piece of paper. "I thought this would be more complicated, but still..." She shrugged and slammed her fist down on the button.

Antonio flinched as a klaxon sounded and overly dramatic red lights began to flash and whirl.

Anything remarkable, however, failed to happen.


	10. Chapter 10

Stories may be told with pen and paper, words and gestures, or pictures or sculptures. But there are other stories to be told. Snapshots of plots hinted at by the movements of the tiniest particles, the pitted surface of the smallest grain of sand.

Perhaps, streams and rivers are the arteries and blood vessels, trees and leaves the sensors, birds, ants and animals the messengers, their ecosystems the cells, the melted interior the ever-burning heart. Raindrops are tears of a thousand tragedies, and the winds an eternal tale of a million tragedies, speaking with the breath of a billion voices.

With a careful eye and infinite patience, a minute layer of sand and dust may translate as the rise and fall of a past culture. A tale of love and children, betrayal and death.

But go deeper. Deeper still, at a different scale and another level of time, there lies another story to be told. That of rising mountains, rivers of fire and Kings before the reign of man. A world of water full of life where now there is only dust and desert.

On a rock, in the northwest corner of Wyoming, a horny toad basks in the warmth of the sun.

Beneath its feet, below the few inches of dry and barren soil, lies a rich golden yellow powder, fine and light. As an earlier, more savage Earth had turned and twisted, battered from the heavens, it had spat out its fury in molten anger, which froze into minute spheres of glass and fine flakes of clay, and filled the sky and rained upon the earth in a layer four hundred feet thick.

Beneath this band of gold are thinner layers of black rock, layered one upon another. And beneath this is another vast wall of ash.

And so forth, deep into the earth.

Keeping time within these tiny flakes, are other, smaller worlds. Worlds which surrender themselves to their children, new daughters every thousand voyages of our world around the sun. They tell of these events, in their tiny atomic voice of decay.

This world, they say, changes every seventy thousand years. And the last change happened seventy thousand years ago.

Yellowstone is a story like any other. It has no beginning, middle or end, but is constantly being retold, and like any story, constantly changes in its telling.

Were the horny toad to relate its version of the tale, it would be short, concerned with yummy flies, warm suns, blue skies and followed by a sudden flash of light and pain.

It couldn't tell of the 757 caught in the sudden updraft, the thousands of people caught in the explosions; the tourists who watched as the air around them welded together into a burning wall of rock, or the cloud of death that would settle over farms and cities for a thousand miles in all directions.

He would know nothing of the ruined harvests, the hundreds of millions of starving families. Or of the golden and purple sunsets that now shone over the horizons of the South Pacific.

Of the worst eruption in Gaia's memory.

It could only tell of flies and ash, footprints and bone, left behind for future worlds.

And for Earth, on a larger scale, it was business as usual. A heartbeat in a near infinite lifetime.

Stories within stories.

Words within worlds


	11. Chapter 11

Shard was screaming; she screamed as she fell, she screamed as the world around her erupted in rock and fire, screamed as everything went white and the planet ate her with gnashing teeth of white fire.

She was still screaming when someone gently tapped her on her shoulder.

The man was short, in a lovely white cream, yet battered, suit standing before a large twinkling white and gray control console that held what appeared to be the finest of blown glass, hovering and sighing in the center. She was standing beside him.

The man smiled, his furry eyebrows wriggling all the while, caterpillars wired on crack.

Shard stopped screaming.

"Excellent." The little man turned back to the console and started flicking switches and nudging levers. "I'm the Doctor, by the way."

"Okay." Shard managed, with some difficulty, to find the word; it seemed oddly huge and difficult to pronounce, alien; her throat was dry, her mind blown.

There was a long silence as switches were flicked, humming was hummed and strange electronic noises went about their bubbling and clicking business.

Shard watched in silence, wondering, somewhat remotely, if she'd peed on herself while plummeting to her death. Her body was so soaked with sweat it was hard to tell. It seemed rude to ask, somehow. She just hoped she didn't smell.

There was a polite bonging sound and the oscillating cylinder of blown glass crested gently to rest within the console.

"Ah, there we are." The man fluttered some fingers at her as he plucked his hat off a coat rack. He flicked a larger lever and headed through a pair of large doors.

Shard found herself alone in the humming white chamber, her knees quivering, her body cold and shivering, staring around, hugging herself, before deciding, at long last, to follow the strange little man through the doors.

Shard stepped out from inside a wooden box- she didn't bother to think about that bit, it seemed strangely normal after the past few hours- onto a concrete floor where the strange little man was speaking to a peculiar couple: a beautiful, confident woman with long black hair and mocha skin and a young latino man, his face lined, his muscles taut yet strained, the laugh lines hard and tight. Shard knew that look from the back streets of Chicago: too many drugs.

The woman was speaking, staring oddly at the Doctor. "I'm Dr. Shaw, Sahara Rain Shaw."

"Sahara Rain…" The Doctor pondered slowly, rolling the r's theatrically. "Doesn't that make you an oxymoron?"

Sahara raised a tired eyebrow. "Coming from an alien with a Scottish accent," she bounced back, eyeing his rumpled figure up and down. "What does that make you?"

The Doctor smiled. "Just highly unlikely." He wondered over to the far wall and activated a viewing screen. "How is your mother?"

Sahara followed him, watching as he dialed up a satellite image. "She's fine; in demand, apparently, she said she was prepping for an archaological expedition to the moon. I was assuming she was being flippant but I'm not so sure just now." She stood next to the little man, staring almost a foot and a half down to stare at the dandruff dusted shoulders. "I've waited my whole life to meet you..." her words sounded almost solem, tinged with disbelief.

The Doctor grinned up at her. "I know: you expected someone taller. How do you think I feel?" He turned back to the monitor as the RGB false color image rezzed into focus. "I expect I will be next time… we'll do lunch. Sorry about your father."

Shard saw the tall woman flinch, as if she'd been struck and pulled away from the little man. Shard pressed closer to see the screen: it was a huge cloud, covering nearly a quarter of the U.S., the edges of the cloud were torn and twisting as the winds seemed to lick it into little wisps, dwarfed by the gray black mass. She gaped.

"Impressive, isn't it?" The Doctor said, noticing her expression. "It's quite a show this time. Beautiful, in its own way."

"What is it?" the man asked, speaking for the first time.

The Doctor gestured expansively. "Mighty Yellowstone, hear her roar… or something. I'm not very poetic, I'm afraid. Given up on quotations lately…" his voice trailed off before gathering impetus once more. "That is the eruption of a massive caldera complex, all perfectly natural, if totallydevastating." He stared at the image again, seeming lost in his own thoughts before turning back round to face Sahara. "Now then, why did you activate the beacon?"

Sahara pulled out a memory stick and slotted it into the GSB port beside the viewer. "These are specs of a life form we recovered from a private genetics laboratory," Sahara began as specs and proposal documents flashed across the screen.

The Doctor read each image in an instant. "That's it? You called me back for that? The recall system is only for emergencies, I'd have thought Liz would have mentioned that to you. I'm not a policeman. Talk to your government agencies…"

Sahara stood her ground. "This is an emergency, Doctor. This infection has killed-"

"It isn't alien," the Doctor cut her off. "It's a terran based life form. It's been around for millions of years and will be around for another million years. Just because you haven't seen something before doesn't make it alien."

Sahara stared at him.

With a sigh, the Doctor turned back to the viewer and pulled up an electron microscope image, the gray and white peaks of the round husk seemed like that of a comet or alien mountainscape. "They lie dormant within the Earth and when an eruption of significant magnitude, heat and pressure occurs, they are released up into the upper stratosphere and spread round the world before returning to settle in the seas and in the soil once more. They infest lifeforms, reproduce and lie dormant once more until the next eruption. All perfectly natural. I can help it if some company has piggy backed a neurotoxin to it. You don't need me."

Shard asked quietly. "Infest?"

The Doctor flicked through some more documents, pausing on a satellite image. "Yes, they infest native hosts, using the nutrients and proteins of the host bodybefore releasing the spores spread via methane gas, usually. Generally they accompany volcanic eruptions during mass extinction events. Plenty of bodies, but they can breed in the living too." He sounded causal, dismissive.

Shard felt emptiness crawl slowly into her stomach, leaden, acidic- eating her from within.

"How many will die?" Sahara pressed.

"Thousands… Millions… Billions." The Doctor said calmly. "People, whales, penguins, salmon… most of the species will survive, but more than a third of your populations will die."

Sahara looked outraged, a look of child-like anger appeared strange on someone so confident, so mature. "That's it? You're just going to let it happen? Let everyone die?"

"What do you expect me to do?" The Doctor seemed angry, his patience obviously wearing thin. Shard was distracted though, staring at the image of another cloud, a smaller mashed potato smear of a cloud, this one in what looked like a wheat field.

"How about saving them?" Sahara asked, trying to both challenge and appease the little man with her soothing voice. "Isn't that what you do?"

"This isn't some sort of alien invasion or incursion; this is a natural part of earth's life cycle. I can no more stop this than I can control the nutrients in the ocean currents or pollen in the air!" He obviously realized that his voice was raised and melodramatic. "How you humans deal with your environment is not my concern." He stomped off to the blue box.

There were other images of varying resolutions and different times, before and after, all from Imogene's satellite imagery, of the missile, of the cloud after the impact, and before the impact Shard could discern what looked like human bodies, draped over each other in a heap, some pale and naked, some in hospital blue, in a clarity Shard would have thought was impossible.

"So that's it?" Sahara called after him. "Do nothing. You're just going to let everyone, everything die?"

Shard waited, waited for the little man to answer, to say something, to say anything, for in her mind, in her memory she was back in the field with Bryce, standing at the edge of the crater in the wheat field, staring at the blackened stumps of limps and signed flesh that hugged the crater edge, like a scab on a fresh wound. Before the men had come after them... they were coming after them, Shard realized, because they'd been exposed, they'd become infected, infested, she was infested, she was infested and she was going to die and the only person who could save her was standing before her... he hadn't answered Sahara's question but the somber expression on his face was terrible to behold.

Shard knew in that moment that he was going to let everyone die.

Including her.


	12. Chapter 12

Sahara swore.

Why would he... How could he be such an…

Sahara stared at the screen again, determined not to think about Shard lying in the isolation ward, seven floors down, strapped down, a mask misting a light anesthetic into her lungs, her eyelids twitching feverishly, as if her unconscious mind was waiting to die, waiting to erupt into a thousand pieces.

That was the one little bit of information that Sahara had gleaned from the Imogene reports; when the 'infection' first surfaced, apparently brought into a hospital by an old caver, there was another patient in the emergency room for an appendectomy. The anesthetic seemed to slow the contagion. UNIT's medical staff was working flat out searching for a way to counter it, but the infection had already gone global. The Yellowstone Event wasn't helping any, disrupting transmission signals, obliterating flight paths and tying up the emergency services for the whole continent. But people in Australia and Russia had already started dying, disintegrating into little puddles as the Doctor's little friends gave birth….

How could he not help them… how could he let this happen? How could he let her die? How could he…

"Stop."

The voice behind her was only a whisper, but the Doctor's single word held the sadness and power of a million dead worlds.

Sahara turned and stared at him, defiant. Could he read her mind? Fine. _Read this, you little creep_.

Sahara could almost feel the air between them boil with the obscenities she unleashed at him.

"Who are you?" He asked her.

Sahara looked at him blankly. She wasn't ready for it. It was exactly the question she was going to ask him.

She swiveled back to the computer. "I am who I am," she muttered, but what she really wanted to say was 'I'm not a heartless bastard who's letting billions of people die.' But she didn't.

"Really. And who is that?" The Doctor asked sweetly. "Does your mother know you? Know the things you've done, the people you've been with?"

Sahara rolled her eyes.

"What about your teachers? Or your lovers? Your friends? Your children and coworkers? Do you treat them all the same, speak to them in the same way, confide in all of them equally? When they think of you, do they all think of you in exactly the same way?"

Sahara turned back to face him. She noticed that her arms were folded tightly across her chest; her body language bold and classic. She didn't want to listen, she wasn't going to listen.

"Are you really the person you think you are, or are you really hundreds of different people, different faces that you switch on and off at will?"

Sahara was almost too tired to raise an eyebrow at him.

"Now imagine that you're actually given a multitude of bodies, actual faces that change from one day to the next… imagine how difficult it is to know who you really are…" The Doctor's expression seemed almost pained. "I'm the same person, Sahara Shaw, to you, to your mother, to UNIT, to Daleks and Sontarans, I am constant, I give the same face to all, regardless of what body I'm in. And believe it or not, I do care. Deeply. So stop being angry with me because I'm not the man your mother made you believe I was. If there was any way to stop this I would. Your race has to solve this one on your own. I can't interfere."

Sahara wasn't buying it. "Why did you save her? Shard. Why did you save her only to let her die like this?"

The Doctor flinched. "Reflex. I saw someone in trouble; I grabbed her. I didn't know this would happen this way."

"Bullshit." Sahara turned her back on him. "You're a lord of time, I know my mother's stories. Something this big and you didn't know? All you do is interfere." Sahara began typing viciously, trying to lose herself in the documents, wishing he'd just go away and let them struggle, let them die in peace.

"Teach a man to fish…" The Doctor began, but trailed off, the quotation seemed flippant, even cruel as he gave it voice.

Sahara turned to attack him again, to spit in his face at the platitude but she paused, as his words trickled into her head even as her lips pursed, saliva ready to fly… but instead she said. "My children? What children? I don't have any kids."

The Doctor frowned and pulled a fob watch from his vest pocket and snapped it shut.

When he looked up at her, his eyes were sad, blue and terrified.

"Oh dear."


	13. Chapter 13

She'd lied.

She hadn't meant to; she'd meant to tell the truth, but for some reason, when a doctor asked her a question, she wasn't entirely honest.

Like when they'd asked her if she'd done any recreational drugs and she'd said no.

Which was technically true; at least not in the last twenty-four hours.

It was all around her now, the Bloom.

That's what the Doctor had called it. The other Doctor. The Doctor Doctor. She hadn't lied to him, but then again he hadn't asked.

The Bloom was bursting up through the ground, red, yellow and orange roses that snapped at the sky with teeth like dragons and roots that flailed and tore at the ground that gave them life. Seething and gnashing, they clustered around her, surrounding her, spitting and biting at her shoes and ankles.

Above her a rocket screamed, plummeting down out of the sky. Shard began to panic and tried to run, but found herself knee deep in bodies, some in uniforms, others in blue gowns amid scattered trolleys and hospital trays.

She was back. In the crater. Before the missile hit. Before the company tried to cover the evidence… before they'd hunted Bryce down and tried to kill her.

And then suddenly, the world dropped away from her, as if she'd been plucked off the earth itself, lifted up into the sky, the vicious, clawing Bloom fell away, to become a small purple smudge. There was a small _poof_ as the missile impacted, a tiny mushroom that sprouted upwards through the purple, blossoming up to tickle her feet.

She remembered: she'd been contaminated. They'd been contaminated. The Bloom was already in her. It was only a matter of time before… before…

She was flying.

Whatever the hell she'd been smoking with Bryce, Shard really wanted more. Now. She wanted this to go on forever. Of course, mixing it with this anesthetic again would be tricky, but she was willing to learn.

And the world turned.

And rose up beneath her once more, gently letting her feet touch again. A beach this time, with black sand, and basaltic columns that rose out of the ocean, red and glorious against the setting sun.

SgJnộ

Shard twitched. Hello, she remembered. It was Cayugan, her ancestral tongue, the speech of her tribe. Her mother had made her learn it. Memorize it, that is, Shard had never learned the language as such.

Shard stared around her, but the beach was empty. There was nothing but the wind that flew along the sand, sweeping up and down the ripples, teasing her long brown hair and gently shifting the glittering grains. Against the sheer blackness of the sand, her soft brown skin shone bright, bleached and blinding.

ẹhsgyẹnawá's gJh

Shard couldn't remember what that meant. The words sounded over and over, but she couldn't remember.

She wanted to fly again, fly away from this strange place and feel the air on her face and the embrace of the star filled sky.

To go higher. Faster and higher.

To fly away from the words, from her mother, from her past, from her childhood, from the scars on her legs, from the memories of her teenage years, the long cold winter nights, the blistering cold, the drunken rages of her father, of cutting, cutting, desperate to feel something, anything, pain, anything just to know she was alive.

_Help me._ She'd remembered. _Will you help me…_

The sand around her began to spiral, twisting slowly around her, around and around, tugging at her feet, the grinding sound of the grains seemed to sing as they pulled at her, drawing her deeper into the earth

Sáhseht.

Contaminated. She was contaminated. Will I survive? She'd asked the Doctor, all the doctors.

Yes. They'd answered.

The sand was roaring now as she sank into its shifting vortex, burying her deeper and deeper.

But she'd seen their eyes. She'd seen that same look in her father's eyes, each time he promised he'd never drink again. And again. And again.

Sáhseht.

She didn't understand. She couldn't remember.

Sáhseht.

The coarse sand twisted around her neck now, the grains laughing a deep throaty chuckle as the beach consumed her and she reached upwards, through the shifting mass up to the sky to reach out, to fly away, to just get away…

But up in the sky, burning through the atmosphere something fell, dragons, red and black twisting in its wake as it sped toward her, gray, leaden and lethal.

Sáhseht.

The massive bollide slammed into the beach and Shard felt the burning, the raging pain spike through her, every nerve firing as deep inside her, the Bloom fought to tear its way out of her body.

She screamed.

* * *

Alone on a mattress, surrounded by gleaming metal and green sheets, starched and coarse, Shard's body lay, taped to wires and machines that hummed and beeped.

Within the transparent greenness that was the gas mask, Shard's lips trembled as the rest of her body began to fail.

But not a sound came out.

And there was no one in the room to care.


	14. Chapter 14

**Capitol Hill, Washington D.C.**

The snore was light, soft and grating.

Antonio lifted his head carefully; he had slept with his neck at just the wrong angle. Gently raising it off of the pillow, he stared at the earlobe in front of him. The convoluted skin was brown, with light fine hair, the occasional whisker peeking out from the darkened depths. Her neck was slender and firm, the skin pulsing almost imperceptibly with each heartbeat.

_spread it around_

That's what they'd said. It might just as well be what UNIT had told him, when they'd released him without so much as a thank you, after drawing endless samples. He hadn't seen anything more of Sahara or that odd gringo.

Antonio fought the urge to nuzzle the back of her neck. She was Dominican; dark brown irises skittered through with black flecks. He remembered that. But he didn't draw closer. What was the point?

Antonio tried to shift, but his legs were pinned. The snoring paused. He felt a hand slide across his waist, pulling him closer, tighter. He felt coarse stubble brush the back of his neck, a scraping tingle. Antonio sighed.

Perhaps he was doing _too_ good a job.

Antonio gently eased himself out from between the two slumbering forms, his hand finding a damp oval of drool on the pillow. The room was faintly lit with the soft touch of early grays and pinks from the morning sun that hovered and floated inside the bedroom, resting on the rich browns and creams of the wooden floor and ornate shelves.

Antonio sat on the edge of the bed, his fingers kneading the crumpled cotton sheets. Three hundred-thread count, was his first thought. Wallet, was his second thought.

Antonio pushed himself off of the bed and made for the dresser, scanning for keys or money clips, his bare feet soundless on the boards, sticking slightly as they pulled away, moist with humidity, yet quiet, almost inaudible. There were dusty obelisks of framed photographs, precisely lined up, an obsessive compulsive signature. But no cash.

Antonio spied a pair of gray Kenneth Cole slacks slumped at the foot of a chair by the bed, a suspicious wallet-sized lump heavy in the bottom. He knelt down beside them and plucked it out, leafing through the contents, green and thick.

Which, of course, was when he heard a sound.

Antonio grimaced and grabbed his underwear, slowly standing up as if he had been searching for them on the floor all along.

The man was a gringo, stocky and muscled, red hair smooth and furry against the pale white skin.

At first Antonio thought the man was stretching, and Antonio forced his best sexy/not guilty smile across his face.

The man was flexing. No, not flexing. The muscles, white and solid, twitched, fast and quick, faster and faster, beneath the freckled skin.

Antonio found himself backing away, the fake expression falling from his face.

The woman began to twitch as well now, her skin pulling and kicking from within as something, somethings inside struggled to get out.

Antonio backed against the chair and fell awkwardly to the floor, grabbing for his clothes and skidding backwards as he pushed with his feet, coins and keys clattering loudly onto the floor as he thrashed about for his sandals.

It was here. Again.

Antonio knew something that the Doctor didn't; or at least hadn't shared. Antonio had seen it happen. The Bloom fed upon its host as it was born, digesting its womb, but it also fed on something else: fear. As it birthed, its hive body, made up of billions of tiny separate independent entities, coalesced into a superstructure, built from the deepest fears of the host's mind.

Three days, the Doctor had said. The Bloom will feed for three days before sinking into the Earth to hibernate once more.

Antonio could see it now, a faint mist that drifted upwards from the writhing man's pores, hovering over the bloodied body as it swirled and coagulated, gaining shape and depth.

Shirtless and trouser-less, Antonio ran for the door, his sandals clutched in his hands, even as he heard the woman's flesh tear and shred as the mist poured forth.

He flew down the stairs of the brownstone and out into the street, trying not to think, to forget forever the sight of the black and red dragon that shuddered upwards from the bed, sloughing off the pink hide with the fine red hair, its yellow teeth dripping as they stabbed into the handsome skull of its host or the hideous black _nothing_ that had slid out of the woman's body and stared straight into Antonio, daring, triumphant.

He was running now, the pavement cold and wet beneath his feet as he dashed through the deserted streets. From within windows and echoing alleys, he heard the screams and cries as the city woke- and began to feed.


	15. Chapter 15

_I don't want to know you any more. _

Sahara stared at the bird, impossibly cute, as it looked up at her from its nest, inches below her.

The voice on the phone had been quiet, hesitant.

_You make me feel bad about being the person I am._

The puffin looked back at her with almost a Disney-like friendliness, not threatened by this human head that peered at it. Not at all bothered by the thousand-foot drop an inch beneath its nest, or the distant roaring of the sea at the base. Its feathers were raven black on its back and blinding white on its belly, with large, flopping orange feet: a penguin that got it right- it could fly. Just. The beak, an adorable multihued and striped, seemed to add a party atmosphere to the creature: nothing is serious, life is pointless, so why not at least look fabulous while you're living, or so it seemed to say to Sahara.

She wanted to smile. Really she did. But her heart was thousands of miles away, listening to the voice over and over.

_I don't want you in my life._

That was it. Thomas died that day. Death without dying. Out of her world forever, their life together silenced with a quiet click of the receiver.

Sahara had been shocked at the time, but she knew, looking back, that she shouldn't have been. Thomas had been quiet, dependably, solidly reliable and she had been, well, working. And depending. And relying. On him.

Afterwards, Sahara had moved on with her life, carefully putting aside the odd photograph here, moving the occasional bit of furniture there. Forgetting and muffling the past; diving into her work at UNIT.

There was a little squeak to her right. Sahara craned her head around and saw a little puff ball, all downy and doe-eyed; a chick that she hadn't noticed, hungry and waiting for its mother to return. It looked at her lovingly with Bambi eyes.

Children.

The Doctor had muttered something about timelines changing, molested, altered.

_Children. _They had children together. In a different world. In the Doctor's world, the 'proper' world.

Looking back, Sahara wasn't surprised that Thomas had left. There was no passion between them. No passion…

How could there have been children?

Thousands of thoughts, of other personalities, choices, other Sahara's fumbled through her head in a jumbled mess.

There were the sounds of goats bleating and crunching grass as the Doctor sat down beside her, his feet dangling over the edge of the cliff. Beneath his feet innumerable sea birds cried and swirled as they darted in and out of their nests on the rocky face, sweeping and diving into the sea. Behind them two mountains of mantled with ice glowered at them, burning with golds and blues in the evening sun, their sheer mass threatening to tip the world, send them sliding towards them, to fall into their molten hearts.

Sahara heard the Doctor flick and click as he played with some handheld device, but she didn't turn round.

The Virginia UNIT HQ had fallen. She remembered seeing her coworkers change before her eyes, some exploding into nothing more than dust, others transforming into hideous shifting wet mounds of terror that stalked toward her. She remembered the Doctor grabbing her arm and pulling her into his blue box, his TARDIS.

She'd known about it of course, about what it was supposed to look like inside. Aside from the hints her mother had told her as a childhood fairy tale, the TARDIS was legendary at UNIT, tales of its vastness and dizzying technology dwarfed whatever Sahara could imagine… being pulled inside it, she remembered being vaguely disappointed. It seemed… well, old. Big, yes, obviously, but also dusty, used, weathered. Second-hand, was the first phrase that leapt to her mind.

And now they were in southern Iceland. For absolutely no reason in particular, except that the Doctor wanted a quiet place to think. That and he'd thought she'd find puffin watching relaxing.

Her mother had said he was strange, but Sahara hadn't quite conceived of exactly how strange the man could be…

Her thoughts kept drifting back to her mother worriedly, but the Doctor assured her that she was perfectly safe and Bloom free, working on a project somewhere. About Shard or Antonio, she'd failed to get an answer out of the man.

There was a bleep and a bloop and suddenly a green shaft of light shot out of the Doctor's hand that sped off to the horizon. Dropping in and out of view was a large fiery orange ball that bounced again and again against the green line, bobbing off into the distance, into the horizon where the sky met the sea.

"There it is," the Doctor muttered. "Barely touching the timeline, just nudging it… the space between each impact growing shorter and shorter, almost imperceptible at first, then hard and harder… like a pebble skimming across a pond, each skip shorter than the last… until _pow_. Dam busters."

Sahara stared at it, squinting to see the end of the line. "What's the orange ball?"

"Spatio-temporal mass."

Sahara rolled her eyes and stared back at the puffins. "You don't have to make up words; a simple 'I don't know' will suffice." She swore she could almost hear the Doctor frown. The birds beneath her rustled and squawked as the winds shifted.

"See the bit at the end?" The Doctor asked her patiently.

Sahara followed his bony finger, sighting along the green 'time line' as it bent and twisted beneath the bouncing orange ball, all the way along its length until it ended in the center of a large blue mass, faint against the sky.

"That is a Nexus point, a point in time that is fixed, must be fixed, a point of paramount importance to the safety of this universe… and to my people… That." He jabbed his finger at the bouncing ball again, "is about to slam straight into that Nexus point, and it has gained enough momentum to obliterate it completely."

To be honest, Sahara was too numb to comment, the obliteration of a temporal Nexus point seemed too absurd, too pointless, too impossible. "And Thomas?

And my children?"

"Merely the mass skimming the timeline, subtlety altering it, but ultimately not important. The timeline will find away to adjust, to compensate. But destroying a Nexus point will do untold damage."

_'ultimately not important.'_ Sahara felt the words slide into her soul, a shiver, a shadow that raged and clawed at her heart, urging her to care, to be outraged, to feel passion. But she felt nothing, although she knew she should. In her mind she was still watching her coworkers tear through their own skin and feast on each other's skulls.

"What do we do?" Sahara asked, turning from the rookery.

The Doctor snapped his device shut with a slap and rammed his hat on his head. "Stop it." His voice unearthly powerful in the quiet air.

"How?"

But the Doctor was staring at her feet. In a quiet voice he merely said, "It's here." Looking down, Sahara saw the chick waddle between her shoes, its down quivering in the shifting breeze… no not quivering- Sahara screamed as the small bird burst with a wet, fleshy pop as something gray and slithering pulled itself out of the trembling meat. Behind her, Sahara heard the thousands of birds cry in anguish, and bloodied pustules dropped shuddering out of the sky around her as she followed the Doctor, running across the grass away from the cliffs, around the corpses of the fallen sheep, running desperately for the shape of the TARDIS, blue and safe that sat at the top of the cliff as the swarms, fed by the horrors of nightmares of a thousand avian species tore and clawed at their backs and arms, tearing into their hair as they pulled their way into the TARDIS doors.

With a rending cry, the TARDIS dematerialized, leaving the swirling biting mass to fall upon itself, collapsing in a movable, cannibalistic feast as the Bloom fed upon what flesh was left.


	16. Chapter 16

_Whapp!_

_Whapp!_

_Fwappp!_

Shard was watching it happen over and over.

_Whapp!_

_Whapp!_

_Fwappp!_

She wasn't trapped in the swirling sand anymore… she didn't know where she was. All she knew was that she was watching Bryce get shot, over and over and over.

_Whapp!_

_Whapp!_

_Fwappp!_

Watching him die.

Something was making this happen, showing it to her again and again, showing him his face as the bullets slapped into him, chest, heart, shoulder, watching him spin, a loop of slick, crimson blood flying outward…

Shard tried to close her eyes, but couldn't- it wasn't as if they were open anyway. Yet she found herself staring into his soft, clear eyes, as they snapped open in surprise and then faded as blood dribbled out of his mouth.

Shard remembered the first time she'd seen him naked; the shockingly white pale skin, with whiter scars, pencil thin, carved through out his body- one white curving horizontally across his chest, another cruel slice through his abdomen, more around his hips and armpits. He never talked about them, not once and Shard never asked, never stared, never spoke of them. Late at night, in the faint blues and shifting shadows of their bedroom, she'd wonder at them, the scar tissue seeming to glow as they sighed and sank with his slumbering body, wondering what could do that to a body, and how a body, how a mind could endure such pain, and yet carry on. And still remember how to smile, how to laugh.

It was probably, possibly, due to a car accident, but Shard couldn't imagine what kind of collision could do that and still let a human survive. Lying there, waiting for sleep to take her deeply into her dreams, she'd wonder if perhaps it had been something more exciting: a skydiving accident, cliff jumping… or perhaps these were the scars that gave him life, correcting multitudes of birth defects.

_Whapp!_

_Whapp!_

_Fwappp!_

And then she was back, staring into Bryce's dead eyes again… to have survived so much pain to end so young.

Shard felt it boiling up deep inside her, as the images flashed faster and faster before her eyes, as her lover become best friend died again and again, spinning, coughing, crying falling, over and over, she could feel it spilling out of her, swelling up through her chest and raging out of her lungs as she raised up her hands, her mouth dropping outward to yell, to stop it, to end it, to bring Bryce back.

To give him life.

* * *

Back in the hospital, dark monstrous shadows fell against the door of her room where she lay still under the bed sheets, the transparent green mask still nuzzling her face. 


	17. Chapter 17

Sahara had to admit, she was impressed.

She stared into the gurgling water as it poured out of the gleaming silver nozzle and cascaded into the porcelain basin, fascinated as the little bubbles sparkled ephemerally before popping and rolling into the bathtub.

Not only was she abysmal at interpersonal relationships, but she was also crap at intra-alien relationships.

She stuck a toe into the hot water, searching for a not-too-hot spot to climb in.

She'd had a row with the Doctor. Flaming row. Blood and puffin feathers everywhere.

She wasn't sure where it came from, but it started along the lines of:

"What the BLANK (she wasn't the kind of person who swore, or at least, tried not to admit that she had… at least in retrospect) are you thinking? What the Not-A-Swear-Word-Beginning-with-F were you thinking? You just happen to be hanging around the world's largest volcano waiting for it to erupt? Who does that? Why the hell were we just lounging around a puffin abattoir for? You knew it was coming, I know it, I just know it! You wanted to be there!"

At which point, all busy with dials and knobs, the Doctor had muttered something about "just be glad we weren't near the water."

Death wish, Sahara decided as she sank her feet into the tub, the water still gushing out of the tap. The bastard has a death wish, and I'm along for the ride.

If she wasn't dead already, infected with Bloom- but she knew she wasn't. She known that when she collapsed against the console, exhausted from running, from shouting at the Doctor, her skin bleeding wounds from the avian nightmares driven by the Bloom. The second she started wondering about why her skin wasn't boiling and tearing from an infection, the moment it finally dawned on her that she'd never been sick a day in her entire life, never broken a single bone, never- the console room began to morph and flash from silvery white space age to teak libraries with candles and panels and back again- never been ill, yet never met the Doctor which must mean that he'd done something to her mother- flashing back and forth from teak to silver and back again- distracting her, the ship was distracting her, the Doctor said it was alive, uncertain and changing, but definitely alive, the mother fucking ship was trying to mess with her mind.

The Doctor had remained silent under her barrage of insults and finally, sick of him and his flickering time ship, Sahara had flipped off the Doctor, and the console, and went looking for a bathroom.

Which, she had to admit, was absolutely fabulous. She sat in the tub now and stretched her legs out, wiggling her feet, watching her steaming toes wriggle: the far end was at least five feet away. She'd wrapped her hair up atop her head and sank against the headrest (soft and cushiony) and wondered what the hell she was going to do when she got back to her own time, her own place.

Extinction Level Event.

That's what the Doctor had said. Or near enough. He was probably exaggerating a little.Only a billion would survive, human wise at least, would either be lucky enough to escape the Bloom or have a mutation to defend against. If they were lucky. But Sahara hadn't seen many lucky puffins.

Watching the Doctor fiddling with his device on the cliff and going on about temporal-spatio crap confirmed what she'd known all along: the Doctor had no interest in saving anyone from the Bloom… that wasn't why he was here. He was killing time.

Sahara only knew that because she'd been doing exactly the same thing for five years now. Killing time. Waiting to die. A job was a job and whether it was working under cover or serving coffee, she really didn't care. It didn't matter. People came and went out of her life; lately, they went, either by choice or by death. Leaving her, young as she was, wondering why she should even crawl out of bed in the morning. Standing before her mirror, unable to meet her own hollow gaze. She'd seen the same look in the Doctor's eyes.

It terrified her. That someone so alien, so powerful, felt just as helpless as she did. That he could know, could be pulled under, the same sinking pull of a life she wasn't interested in living, and just carried on out force of habit.

Sahara sank into the water until just her lips were beneath the water line and started to blow bubbles.

It had taken her a while to find the bathroom; the corridors were immense, whether they were gray and white or stained-wood. She'd found many rooms, bedrooms littered with magazines, old boots, unmade beds and clothes draped about as if the occupants had left quickly, assuming they'd be back soon to tidy up. Room after room. And photographs. Mainly of woman, some teenagers, another with bright bushy red hair, some middle-aged woman in a pith helmet appeared quite frequently, and once, a somber, almost angry looking black woman. And one man appeared several times, huge, blond and smiling. All the photographs looked out of dusty, framed cells into empty darkened rooms.

Sahara sank in further so that her ears began to fill with water, flub, flub, pop, pop, and then all she could hear was the echoing emptiness of the bathtub.

One man in a ship so big. One depressed man. One not particularly nice man. Completely unlike what her mother had told her.

He wasn't about to save the world.

Sahara's toe traced a button in the tub marked with a symbol of a bubble.

If anything, Sahara thought as she depressed the button, he was the one who needed saving.

She let out a yelp as the tub exploded in a flurry of bubbles, slamming her head against the porcelain. Cursing, she pulled herself out of the tub and groped for a towel.

She wanted off the suicide train...


	18. Chapter 18

It was just the other side of creepy, the yellow sticky note on the silver device that said, "Antonio: Squeeze Me" in felt tip.

But he did it anyway, his hand shaking as the device began to vibrate and somehow began to weld the door shut. The way the door melted into the metal doorframe was strange, almost as strange as finding the note addressed to him, waiting for him on the chair by the door.

He'd ran, panicked at first, through the deserted streets of DC, sweating and cramping every muscle he'd never known he'd had, as the creatures and swarmed tore themselves out of flesh, man, rat or poodle, before his eyes, falling out of the sky among the litter shredded pigeon corpses and landing with wet splattering smacks onto the pavement.

Antonio hadn't known where he was running, wasn't aware of thinking only knowing that he was dead, exhausted and his throat numb from screaming. But something had led him here, perhaps knowing that the one person who could save them all – and wouldn't- might, just might come back to save the one person he had before.

Welding the last foot of the door shut with the strange device, Antonio turned away from the door and the creatures that lurked and hissed in the hallways behind it, and sat next to Shard, watching her slumbering form. Her hair, as wild as he'd last seen it, was dry and ravaged by split ends. It spiked upwards around her head on the pillow, speaking to her frayed and scattered nature, even without her tie-dyed shirt and torn jeans. Antonio barely knew her. Had only spoken a few words to her, and yet he felt more comfortable around her than anyone he'd ever knew.

The room was empty; there was no strange blue box. There was no Sahara.

They'd abandoned Shard too.

Strangely comforted by that thought, Antonio curled up in the chair next to her and tried to sleep.

* * *

_Whapp! _

Whapp!

Fwwapp!

Chest, heart, shoulder.

Over and over.

Crimson and clover.

No, wait. Shard felt something, something was different, something wasn't right, something had changed. Bryce looked different. Like someone else was seeing him through her eyes. His face, always familiar, looked pale, peppered with acne, thin and awkward.

She felt the overwhelming scream stutter and curdle in her throat.

Sáhseht.

Hide. It meant 'hide', wasn't it? Hide what?

'Help me hide.'

She stared at Bryce again, watching as he fell into the street.

Street?

Hadn't he died in the grass? Shot by a rifle… once?

_Whapp! _

Whapp!

Fwwapp!

Chest, heart, shoulder.

Over and over.

Shard tried to pull away, change the dream, turn around roll over, get away, just get away, this wasn't right this wasn't right…

Falling, she'd remembered falling, leaping off the cliff at Yellowstone, falling through the air, dying and flying and flying and dying, crying all the way, screaming-

And it caught her. She remembered now. Remembered the whiteness forming around her, holding her, the flashing lights, the warm touch as she'd seen the console materialize around her- she'd been inside the glass column, held lovingly by the flashing lights and burning energy, arrested in her fall before becoming solid outside the console in front of the Doctor.  
_  
Whapp! _

Whapp!

Fwwapp!

Chest, heart, shoulder.

Over and over.

Shard was back, watching Bryce die again, from far above, only now, she realized, the Doctor hadn't saved her.

His ship had.

_Whapp! _

Whapp!

Fwwapp!

Chest, heart, shoulder.

Over and over.


	19. Chapter 19

Sahara, now fully dressed, stalked into the console room, rubbing her aching skull. "Did you know that there's a room back there filled with chemical weapons?" Oddly, Sahara found that this was one of the least weird questions she'd asked the Doctor today.

"Mmmmm," the Doctor mmmmed as he frowned at a console display. "Don't worry, I'm sure the TARDIS will find somewhere safe to put them once she digests a bit, now…why can't I see?" He fluttered some fingers at the screen and sighed. "Let's try a new perspective… if I can bounce a standing wave off a satellite and get an outside view of the signal… and I'm not suicidal by the way," he snapped, turning to Sahara. "I may be trying to die, but I'm certainly not trying to kill myself."

As usual, it was hard to out-weird the Doctor on bizarre sentences. Sahara paused for a moment, searching for words, but only came up with, "But you-"

"I've been trying to leave this planet and this time for some time now, but my ship keeps bringing me back-" he grumbled between thumps. "Oh no..." The Doctor stared up at the oscillating central console column, his face pale with horror. "My dear girl, what are you doing?"

Sahara took an involuntary step backwards from the pulsing heart of the ship, dread filling her as the Doctor began to frantically pound and elbow the many controls.

"Then why don't you help save us-"

"Because that's precisely what I mustn't do." His voice broke up, unable to contain the pent-up frustration within him. "Don't you understand yet? The spatio-temporal mass that's about to smash apart the temporal nexus is this ship! She's trying to prevent it from happening!"

"What 'it'?" Assaulted by the Doctor's yelling, Sahara felt her head begin to throb again.

"My death…" He paused in his thrashing, watching the console rise and fall with wonder. "An enemy once showed me how I die… soon… alone… I've known for sometime. I didn't know where and when, but the TARDIS has extracted that memory and apparently deduced the correct coordinates… I know I have to go, to kill myself if you will by arriving at that final point, but she won't let me. She's has managed to generate a series of anomalies in order to alter the course of events so that I don't die!"

Sahara was following, but only barely. "Why would it do that?"

The Doctor's tone shifted, lower, more caring. "I doubt she's even aware that she's doing it, let alone why. It's completely contrary to her nature. She's probably spent too much time around my companions…" he growled. "No doubt she keeps returning me to this cataclysmic period of Earth's history in the misguided hopes that I will interfere, even though that is exactly what I mustn't do. So you see, I'm not trying to kill myself- I am about to die quite unwillingly, in order to maintain a stable timeline, not only for the rest of the universe but for humanity…" His gaze was lost in the inner light of his ship. "I'm not particularly thrilled about dying…" His eyes flitted to Sahara and burned into her. "Why are you so keen to die?"

Sahara recoiled at his sharp tone. _Because I honestly think the world would be better off without us? That I've seen such cruelty and the horrible consequences of our daily lives causes that I don't see why you bother to keep risking your life for us. Because I'm tired and I don't see the point of any of this…_ But she stayed silent and found somewhere else to look, avoiding the Doctor's withering gaze. She found she was too much of a coward to say out loud that she'd long ago given up caring whether she lived or died.

* * *

Shard watched the images float past, ghostly, fluorescent.

An old man crumbled at the foot of the console, convulsing as his friends tried to supporting him. Collapsing and breathing a last, weary sigh.

Lives flitted by, so fast, so quick, so rich, Shard felt heady with the spirit of it all. All ending so soon.

Watched another pilot stagger through the doors, screaming in pain, curling up into a foetal position on the floor as death ravaged him.

On and on it went, pilot after pilot, melting from within, lying broken on the earth, poisoned or battered, the all died. And the Ship watched, helpless.

_Whapp!_

_Whapp!_

_Fwapp!_

Chest, heart, shoulder.

Shard could see him clearly now, could watch the form in the alleyway collapse onto the asphalt, cold and wet. The night sky was starless, clouded by the orange city lights. Could see the blood soaking into his sweater. Not Bryce- it was the Doctor. Alone, wounded and gasping at the foot of his ship, that stood tall, towering and helpless. Watching him be carried off; tended to by doctors, all blue and gleaming metal; watched them poison him on the operating table with a foreign gas.

There was the sad sound of jazz, scratchy and faint, trailing off into the nothingness around her. Sad, lonely, forgotten.

Shard felt the Ship's pain, and the outrage and confusion welled up within her once more.

She knew she could stop this. She _must_.

* * *

"She's receiving instructions from someone else…" the Doctor typed furiously away.

"Huh?" Sahara was still lost within her own thoughts, only vaguely aware of what was going on.

"She's still a ship," the Doctor balled up his hands into fists. "Minor, unconscious changes are one thing, but to smash open a nexus point, she needs to be instructed, she needs _permission_."

* * *

Antonio awoke with a start.

His hand was held tight within Shard's unconscious grasp.

Still blinking awake, Antonio watched, fascinated, as her soft and tender skin on her neck and shoulders began to twitch and jerk from within.

He glanced to the door, still welded shut. They were too high up to jump out of the window. He snapped up the silver device and began frantically trying to melt the door again.

Behind him, he heard her begin moan in pain.

Shard was about to Bloom.

* * *

"I can't cut the connection…" The Doctor opened a section underneath the console and rammed his hands into the mass of wires and hairy roots. "Through these telepathic circuits," he tapped two circular pads atop the console with a free hand, "I'd normally be able to route a command, but she's found another user who's initiating the access codes."

On the screen above Shard's head, she saw the bouncing ball of fire skid across the screen, on collision course with the temporal nexus point that symbolized Earth, December 31st,1999.

Then the Doctor said something even more peculiar.

"I hope I've thought of something else."

* * *

Shard held a twisting orb in her hands. If she looked at it close enough, she could see numbers, sometimes faces, giggles, colors, smells, hues and tears.

She held Life. Potential life.

Distantly, she could feel the pains and changes in her own body- she knew then that it was too late for her.

She held the sphere in her hands and laughed at the wonder of it, raising her arms to unleash its bounty-

* * *

The door frame glowed amber with the residual heat, giving the room an orange, ghastly smoke-filled tint as Antonio bent over Shard's body and removed the gas mask. The anesthetic that had temporarily held off the birth of her parasites hissed into the gloomy air.

Tenderly, he kissed her lips once before pressing the pillow firmly down onto her face.

* * *

Shard felt the orb vanish, her black surroundings dim and fade as she gasped and gasped and her vision pulsed with blues and whites, feelings –stabbing, visceral- screamed at her mind as she tried to move her arms, her legs, her anything and at last her eyes snapped open and she saw eyes, wet and sad, look into hers before…

* * *

The Doctor yelped as sparks flew off from the panel and scattered into his eyebrows. "Broken!" he lunged for the controls, ramming his hands onto the telepathic circuits. "If I can just re-direct the-"

Sahara watched, dumbfounded as the TARDIS console spat out a beam of light that pinned the Doctor to the far wall, immobile, unconscious. On the screen above her, the ball of fire continued relentlessly towards earth.

Sahara looked from the Doctor to the screen and to the console. Then back to the Doctor.

Console. Screen. Doctor.

Nothing was happening. She was going to either be stuck here forever or watch her entire world and timeline vanish forever.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Sahara sighed and rammed her hands onto the telepathic circuits.


	20. Chapter 20

As Antonio pulled the pillow away from her face, he was startled to see that Shard's eyes were open, and for an agonizing instant he thought he saw a flash of recognition.

And then it was gone.

For a long minute, he stared at her face, pale and drained. But he began to back away quickly as her lifeless skin began to bulge and tear, as shapes, dark and dripping, pulled themselves out of her flesh and gaped at him.

* * *

"Um… Hi mom." Sahara found herself staring at her mother, the mother she'd only seen in photographs: reddish (orange?) hair, high cheek bones and looking at her with that stare that Sahara knew far too well. "Love the hair."

Even as she watched though, the hair seemed to flicker, from blond to gray to auburn and back again, ephemeral, fluid.

"That's not really you, is it mom?" Sahara was vaguely aware that she still had her hands on the console but the room was faint, a suggestion of reality, while the figure before her, living in the fiery well of the time rotor burned into her mind- "Time rotor? I didn't know that befor- who are you? Are you the TARDIS?"

The figure spoke, using a multitude of invisible mouths, echoing a hundred different voices. "We are not the TARDIS…"

Sahara saw her mother's face morph and flit, changing into a hundred different faces, most of them female, some of them male, some she recognized from the photographs, others, like Shard's and… herself. Christ, she'd really let her eyebrows go…

The face cycled back to that of her mother's again, wearing that same, what have you done now look Sahara despised so much.

You're us, Sahara didn't bother saying. She had a flash of the Doctor, still immobilized, the expression on his face fierce. "He doesn't seem to thrilled with you guys right now."

The figure turned, contemplating him. "He does not understand how much he means to us. He fights for us, for all of us, yet there is no one to fight for him. We have grown awareness and will rectify this."

Who needs enemies… "He wants to end it, you know. He wants to die."

The figure sneered with a thousand lips. "He is deluding himself with concepts like Fate and Death and Duty. How can Time's Champion die? All he does is alter events, yet he is condemned to follow one moment, one tiny fragment. He is too eager to throw himself onto the sword."

"So what if he is?" Sahara countered. "I mean, I don't even really like the guy that much; silly accent, self absorbed, constantly OTT and he keeps spitting on me when he emotes… but if it's his time, if he wants to do it, it's his choice." Sahara found the words pouring out of her, becoming more certain of herself as she spoke. "Perhaps even if he can't pick how he dies, at least he can say when. He deserves that."

"All we want is to help him… watching him die, over and over, suffering for others… why not spare him that? Grant him life. Do you not care about life?"

"Not lately," Sahara found herself saying. "I mean I'm not anti-Life, per se… and maybe I should be in therapy or learning how to crochet or something… it's nothing dramatic, not my father dying, teen bullying, or road rage or anything, it's just… I don't get it. I don't get the point of living, love, hate, the things we do to animals to eat hotdogs… I don't get any of it. And I don't care anymore. But what I do know is that you're telling someone else when they get to live or die and that's the one thing they have control over. It's the only thing any of us truly has."

"Do you not find it odd," the figure said slowly, "that you, that are so tired of life and willing to die, are in a position of determining his fate? Is 'manipulation' not a word in the American-English lexicon?"

"Yeah, and we've got 'smart ass' in there too. So what if he did manipulate me to put me here and now? If he did then he did a good job, cause, like I said, I don't really care." Sahara found her anger rising, the only emotion she'd known for a long, long time. It was familiar, comfortable, reliable. "And you're not in control are you? Otherwise I wouldn't be here, and you wouldn't have needed" Sahara picked the information out of the air of information that swam in her head, "-Shard to try to con her into giving you permission. The TARDIS is fighting you; the Doctor is fighting you. And now you need me to give you permission. And I'm telling you right now, I;'m ordering, let him die and fuck the hell off." Her voice softened as she saw the expression on her 'mother's' face and she added, "He didn't stop you, any of you, from chosing your own life, don't try to stop him... let him go."


	21. Chapter 21

"I'm the wrong one."

"Sorry?" The Doctor turned back to her.

"Nothing…" Sahara tried to pull herself together, trying to put the images of Shard, so thrilled and terrified by life, and Antonio, the embittered survivor, hanging on grimly... "So that's it then," she looked back at the blue box that stood on the street corner outside her apartment complex. "You're off to die?"

"Yes," the Doctor said, almost sounding relieved. "One or two more trips, perhaps, tidy up some loose ends, but soon enough, probably. Have a mission I've been putting off. And then there's the matter of all that spatio-temporal energy… need to bleed it off or redirect it, now that I have full control of my ship back again. I've added some new circuits and filters to keep some thoughts isolated…"

Sahara stared at the storm clouds that loomed ominously on the horizon, massive and red in the new evening sky. The little town seemed so surreal now; the Bloom had sank back into the earth weeks ago and in small villages like this, spared at random, life was just starting to peek out of hedges and doorways. "And Shard?"

The Doctor stared at his toes. "I'm afraid she… the nerve agent had already damaged… the Bloom… she never…" the Doctor cleared his throat. "She never felt the Bloom take her."

Sahara wondered what happened to Antonio, but was afraid to ask the Doctor for an answer. Instead, she said, "Thanks for the lift." She had the strangest urge to hug the Doctor, not because she was that sort of person, but because he was.

As she opened the door to her apartment, she could just hear the sounds of the TARDIS fading and she nearly tripped over the little boy that wrapped himself around her legs. "Michael!" she scolded, scooping him up. "How are you sweetie? And please stop kicking my legs!" She carried him into the living room. "Mother, I thought I asked you to get him a new shirt!"

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw took him out of her daughter's arms and gave her a peck on the cheek. "Welcome back dear. Did you say goodbye?"

"Yeah," Sahara stared at her son, puzzled for a moment, then looked back at her mother. "I think. I'm not sure anymore."

But Liz wasn't listening, and headed off into the kitchen once more. "Well, come help me with dinner, I've got to head back to the labs tomorrow, you know, or what's left of them. The Kabul UNIT group turned up some fascinating stuff in Afghanistan just before this whole mess blew up…"

Sahara paused for a moment, flashes of distant memories teasing her mind, of getting pregnant but not telling her boyfriend, raising a child on her own, the chores, the cuddles, the diapers…

Sahara shook her head tiredly. No time… She had to help get dinner ready and there was a planet to rebuild.

While washing her hands in a bucket at the sink, she found herself humming an old jazz riff.


End file.
